High-end Maxwell architecture finally makes its way to mobile segment. GeForce GTX 980M and GTX 970M are the first high-end Maxwell graphics cards in notebooks, and we finally see why NVIDIA made the transition to 900 series.

We should note that GTX 980M/970M are not the first Maxwell mobile parts, there was also GTX860M, based on GM107.

GeForce GTX 880M, which has been with us since March, was nothing else than a third installment of GK104 in mobile form. It’s about time NVIDIA finally makes the transition to a new architecture.

Bear in mind, that the screen-shot above (source NotebookReview) is most likely showing wrong values for TMUs and ROPs. While TMUs are easy to calculate, we don’t know if NVIDIA enabled full Raster engine in mobile GM204. If they did, we have 64 ROPs, if not, 32 ROPs could also be the possibility.

Update: GeForce GTX 980M has full 64 ROPs, while GTX 970 has 48 ROPs.

In fact GTX 980M and GTX 880M share very similar specifications. Both cards have 1536 CUDA cores, so it’s going to be interesting to see how core efficiency increased since last flagship graphics card.

GeForce GTX 970 on the other hand only sports 1280 CUDAs. This card also comes with shorter bus width (192-bit) and less memory (starting with 3GB). It’s a good indicator of what might happen in desktop segment soon. It basically means NVIDIA already has 192-bit GM204 GPU, so they can easily transform it to GTX 960 or whatever they are planning.

The fact that NVIDIA did not use full GM204 core in mobile GPU is not shocking. These cards will never be as fast as desktop variants, due to strict TDP requirements. The lesson here is that next GeForce 1000 series, GTX 1800/1080M (whatever it’s called) will most likely feature GM204 with more SMMs enabled. NVIDIA has still large field of improvement, as there are 4 SMMs disabled in N16E-GX (980M GPU).

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 900M

GeForce GTX 980M

GeForce GTX 970M

GeForce GTX 870M

GeForce GTX 880M

Architecture

28nm Maxwell

28nm Maxwell

28nm Kepler

28nm Kepler

GPU Codename

GM204 (N16E-GX)

GM204

GK104 (N15P-GT)

GK104 (N15E-GX)

CUDA Cores

1536

1280

1344

1536

TMUs

96

80

112

128

ROPs

64

48

24

32

GPU Clock

1038+ MHz

924+ MHz

941+ MHz

954+ MHz

Memory Clock

1253 MHz

1253 MHz

1250 MHz

1250 MHz

Memory

4GB/8GB GDDR5

3GB/6GB GDDR5

3GB GDDR5

4GB/8GB GDDR5

Memory Bus

256-bit

192-bit

192-bit

256-bit

Bandwidth

160 GB/s

120 GB/s

120 GB/s

160 GB/s

TDP

?

?

100W

120W

Launch Date

Oct 7th, 2014

Oct 7th, 2014

Mar 12th, 2014

Mar 12th, 2014

In case you’re wondering how fast will GTX 980 be, MSI has posted a teaser with GTX 880M and GTX 980M comparison. As you can see almost a 60% improvement. You can find more results in our previous post.

NVIDIA GTX 980M/970M press slides:

Guys over at NotebookReview forums found few MSI notebooks with GTX 900M GPUs: